My first taste of so.cl today. An experiment by Microsoft to make search more social.

It has a certain Facebook look to it, but their equivalent of the cover photo is a slideshow of latest searches carried out. Remember, these are searches by other users, not your own. I had been on there all of two minutes when this one popped up:

Yes, it's a search for lesbian gif and, yes, I censored it

Methinks they still have a few issues to iron out…

It’s difficult to avoid the ads for BT Infinity at the moment. Those 3 rather mature undergrad students sharing a house and tales of broadband woe crop up everywhere.

To Infinity and Beyond (with © to Disney / Pixar and thanks to the baby geeks for letting me borrow him)

And while it’s the headline that grabs the imagination – 8x faster than the UK average, I experienced first hand the change it can make to someone’s online experience over the weekend.

A long term client who lives in Blean has always struggled with his connection – rarely getting anything more than 0.5Mb and a lack of 3G, he’s had to leave home to carry out big online tasks.

But last week he was upgraded to BT Infinity and everything has changed.

That depressing 0.5 has exploded to 26.4 Mbps – he can now change videos on YouTube or iPlayer at the speed of flicking channel on his TV. This is the great thing about fibre to the cabinet – it’s not about how far you live from the exchange now.

So we can only get excited when we see the (relative) swarms of BT vans around Whitstable upgrading our cabinets – have you noticed how many of them are around at the moment? Now, if I could just convince them to run some fibre up to the door of HDG Towers…

Oh, Microsoft, you’ve disappointed me. And you were doing so well.

In the last few weeks I’ve enjoyed using Windows 8, moving to a Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 and even migrated a couple of clients from Google Apps to Office 365. Eek!

Microsoft Security Essentials continues to impress and recent events have even made them appear more clued up on security and patching than Apple. So, how have they spoilt this?

Well, it’s a little Optional Update they have sent out – Bing Desktop.

Right click, Hide update

Now, it’s hard enough getting clients to click on the little update warnings and making sure they keep safe and sound by running them. So it really doesn’t help when they try to do the right thing and download something that completely confuses them.

The Bing Desktop installs a search box onto your desktop, changes your homepage and replaces your search defaults. Like most other annoying toolbars. However, It also changes your desktop background or ‘wallpaper’.  So the client with best intentions ended up well and truly confused!

I know it was only ‘Optional’ but I don’t think it should have been there at all.

Putting aside the purists’ argument that addiction can only really exist in the physical addiction to a chemical sense (I gave up arguing with him), the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale has been developed to see if you are hooked to Facebook.

According to the report by the University of Bergen there are six signs you need to look out for:

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

For each of the above signs, consider if you experience that sign very rarely, rarely, sometimes, often, and very often. If you answer “often” or “very often” for at least 4 of the signs, then you could have a Facebook addiction.

Personally, I refuse to take the test until there is a Facebook app for it.

In the meantime, if you think you can handle it, please go and like any or all of these Facebook pages…

http://www.facebook.com/hdgnet
http://www.facebook.com/fairlymarvellous
http://www.facebook.com/deargeek

…dare you like all 3?

Typical, isn’t it? Could I be given access to my shiny, new Google Drive at 9am? No, I had to be given access at 11pm. The night before BNI (which means being up before 6).

Google Drive? Let me at it!

Can I resist having a go? Of course not!

So, 5 minutes in, is this going to hurt my ongoing love affair with SugarSync? No, not yet. It suffers from the same limitation as Dropbox, only files in a particular folder are synchronised. I find SugarSync so much more powerful.

But, for those looking to have a shared folder / server like experience, this could be big, very big.

Watch this space!

Apparently, although no doubt this is not cast in stone, come June Whitstable will have their broadband connection upgraded. “Fibre to the Cabinet” will roll out, which means instead of dodgy old copper between your house and the exchange, most of the distance will be covered by fibre optic cable.

So the broadband connection between the exchange and the little green cabinet round the corner from you will get a lot better. And boy, do we need it…

I’ve been fiddling around with mobiles and SIMs while I upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 800 (more on that in another post, I suspect) and decided to run some speed tests. First of all, on my normal broadband connection:

3.46Mbps down, 0.65Mbps up

Then, on my 3 mobile connection:

4.89Mbps down, 1.57Mbps up

Yes, that’s a 40% increase using the mobile.

Roll on June, I cannot wait!

When I worked for a very big corporate, one of my colleagues was blind. Of the many things I learned from him (besides what it’s like to share an office with a dog*) one was the importance of website accessibility.

This guy was responsible for selecting and managing service providers for this big company – to be selected to provide a service to a company this size can completely change your business. Of course, when your only contact with someone is via email, you’d have no idea he was blind. And so many of those emails would contain the words “see our website for more details” so he would.

The way this guy used his PC was amazing. He had a small Braille device above the keyboard but most of the time he used his headphones. He had software on his PC that would read out every piece of text, menu, pop-up and option box. How he coped with this cacophony I do not know!

What’s this got to do with websites?

Now, your website is your shopfront. And just as you wouldn’t open a shop with a 2-foot step at the door to prevent the disabled getting in, you should be building your website to allow the visually impaired in. There’s some very useful information at the RNIB website about the UK law for website accesibility – yes, this is a legal requirement. In fact, the RNIB started their first case against a website earlier this year.

When this guy visited a website that he couldn’t read, well, that supplier got crossed off the list. Plain and simple.

There are lots of things you can do to make your website more accessible, but three really important starters are:

• Don’t use images as text, unless you have all the text available elsewhere or in ALT tags
• Don’t use tables to layout your design – screen readers hate these. Besides, if you’re a web designer who hasn’t learnt CSS yet, get your coat.
• Don’t build your entire site in Flash – lots of DIY website tools used to be built in Flash but fortunately that is starting to die out. Not so much because they are invisible to the visually impaired – because they don’t work on iPads!

Google cares too

Google indexes sites based on their content – i.e. the text on the page. Headings and text all play a vital role in your website competing against other sites in the all important Google rank. If your site doesn’t have text and headings, it won’t be ranked highly. We all know that adding a few meta keywords to your site does nothing for Google now. And a little description tag at least gives people something to read if they do find your site on Google. But for any useful search phrases, your site will appear right down at the bottom if it doesn’t have some content.

How can I tell what my site looks like to a visually impaired visitor?

The simplest check is to turn off images – this page explains how to disable images in your web browser. Try it now and you’ll see that although it looks a lot less pretty, on this page you can still read all the content and navigate the site. That’s because all our fairly marvellous website design work is accessibility and SEO friendly.

I’ll leave you with a screenshot of a website that demonstrates this perfectly – unfortunately I probably didn’t explain the issue too well so the owner remains someone else’s client! It does look fantastic when the images are turned on though.

How not to build a website

* This dog had a habit of ignoring his basket. I would come back from meetings to find him curled up under my desk – this blonde Labrador went so well with my black suit!

What a day. It started with the rush to get orders in for the Raspberry Pi – no, not a fruit based pastry dish. It’s a credit card sized computer, about as minimal as you can get while remaining functional and bringing with it a hope that it can kickstart a new generation towards getting the skills our IT industry so desperately needs. Brings back memories of my dear, old ZX81, sob.

Although I must admit, I wasn’t in that queue. Instead, I was one of the hordes watching Microsoft for the consumer review release of Windows 8. At the same time, I was also watching news of Facebook’s launch of Timeline for Pages unfold.

Well, I now have both and have found equal levels of “ooh”, “ahh” and “grrr” for each of them. Some things good, some annoying and some that may well be a downright pain in the backside. No doubt, after some sleep, I will write more.

For the time being though, here is my very own sneak preview. It’s Dear Geek’s “new” Facebook Page, viewed on Windows 8…

The Dear Geek Facebook page on Windows 8

We love using iStockphoto – for our advertising, blogs, websites and our clients’ websites when we give them the fairly marvellous Kent website design treatment.

They have very high standards for accepting images into their library which they then combine with great pricing.

Anyway, don’t just take our word for it, sign up by clicking here for 10 free images from www.istockphoto.com

And the great thing is, if you decide to purchase more images, we get some free credits as a bonus too. How cool is that?

I saw this great post “How to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo with Timeline” over on Gizmodo and had to have a go myself. The idea is, by playing around with your Profile and Cover pictures on Facebook, you can get a pretty nifty effect. I didn’t have the greatest of source pictures, but if you have a look at my Facebook profile you’ll get the gist.

I made this!

If you’ve got Photoshop, head over to Nico’s Facebook Timeline Hack Template post to download the template.